Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Prepare a standard loaf pan using your favorite method. I’m a fan of lining the pan with foil and spraying with cooking spray.

Whisk together flour, baking powder, salt, and nutmeg. Set aside

Combine the eggs, sugar, eggnog, melted butter and vanilla in a separate bowl. Add egg mixture to the flour mixture and stir just until moistened. The original recipe said that the batter will be lumpy, but mine wasn’t, amazingly enough. Just keep reading…Fold in cranberries.

Pour batter into the prepared pan. Bake for about 45 to 55 minutes. Check for done-ness by inserting a toothpick into the center of the loaf. Cool in the pan on a wire rack for 10 minutes. Remove from pan and cool completely before cutting.

What I did:

Since I knew that this would probably only make 1 loaf, I doubled the ingredients so I could make two loaves. I didn’t feel like hauling out the stand mixer (mistake #1), so I mixed everything together with my adorable little hand mixer (mistake #2). The dough quickly decided to adhere to one only one of the paddles, working its way toward the mixer base like a snake, and throwing dough everywhere outside of the bowl. When my hand mixer started making a funny smell (I think I might have started to burn the engine up), and all the dough was far too dry and sticky to be decent bread, I realized that I’d forgotten to double the wet ingredients (mistakes #3-5). More eggs…more eggnog…lots more eggnog…then folded in the cranberries with a spatula. All 6 cups of them (mistake #6). Wow, lots of cranberries…

So, divided everything up and stuck it all in the oven. After an hour, the house smelled divine! I knew that all the mistakes I’d made would be worth the end result.

Only it took about twice as long to cook the loaves due to the amount of cranberries that were in the dough (mistake #…oh forget it. Too many to count). Yeah, I forgot that when you are using fresh fruit, it always adds baking time. What can I say? It’s the holidays, and everyone is going faster than they care to admit.

I covered the loaves with foil during the last bit of baking time so that their tops wouldn’t burn.

Terribly blurry photo…Sorry about that. Its the only one that I got before the bread was gone.

Reaction:

This was one of those times in my life when everything should not have turned out, but some miracle it actually did. The bread is super moist, and it easily falls apart when cut/handled/looked at, but the flavor is very sweet and tart at the same time. And not overwhelmingly eggnog-y.

I loved this recipe. And I love making quick breads like this. I think I would like to maybe concentrate on them a little more so that I can get the moisture level to a good point without having the bread fall apart on me when I cut it. I could have used less cranberries and less eggnog, and it probably would have been fine.

I love eggnog. I know there are quite a few people that think it is the nastiest, most vile thing on the planet, but I am not one of them. Granted, I don’t drink gallons of it during the holidays, … Continue reading →